Personal updates, including the career updates, publishing news, etc.
I wrote Chameleon back in 2023 for The Hope Prize (a competition jointly run by Readings and Simon and Schuster, sadly with an absolutely exorbitant $25 entry fee, and a questionable approach to the copyright of the stories authors submit). It wasn’t selected for the shortlist, and over the past 3 years I’ve submitted it […]
So, I recently spent a week in Los Angeles hobnobbing with the likes of Kevin J. Anderson, signing books with S. M. Stirling and making a bunch of brand new friends. Why? Because I was lucky enough to win first place in Q2 2025 of the Writers of the Future Contest, and the prize includes […]
Pretty much what it says on the tin. Aurealis Magazine is Australia’s oldest and grandest speculative fiction magazine, with ten issues annually, each one choc full of new fiction, articles, essays and book reviews. And, since the start of the 2026, I’ve been one of the reviewers. I wanted to challenge myself to read more […]
The other day I typed THE END on the first draft of Threat Vector, my current Work In Progress. Phew! 117,000 words of pure (actually not that pure), unadulterated (actually needs quite a bit of adulterating, if I’m honest) adrenaline! First, the pitch: Xav and Yas, an Australian penetration testing duo, are tricked into breaking […]
I learned in February that my novella Homecoming, a story about the search for home in the remnants of a ruined galaxy, was shortlisted for the Aurealis Award for the Best Science Fiction Novella of 2025. Since 1995, the Aurealis Awards have been the premier Australian genre fiction awards, recognising the best in Australian science […]
Exciting News! Book XI: A Journal of Literary Philosophy has accepted and published my short story And Colour Shall Set Her Free, which you can read free on their website. The story has been floating around for a little while. I had the original idea while reading Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture back in early […]
I checked in here for the first time in a couple of months with the intent of letting you all know that Project Gateway is now available for pre-order, and realised how much had happened since my last update! Phew! So, a massive thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way, supported […]
A friend of mine, Weird Blue Yonder, has started a podcast: Tales from the Weird Blue Yonder. And, they’ve chosen my story, The Only Saviour You’ll Ever Need, for their first episode! How cool is that? The story is fully voice acted, with sound effects, aliens, flabbergasted Presidents and a very annoyed Pope, all in […]
That’s right, the first story I’ve ever sold, Foretold, has just been published, in issue #172 of Aurealis Magazine. A big thank you to all the people who helped me get to this point: my folks, my partner, both my writing groups, and also to Michael Pryor and the team at Aurealis for their confidence […]
In my last update, I mentioned (teased?) that I’d won an argument with a publisher regarding the overzealous, unintentionally grabby, intellectual property provisions they’d included in their terms and conditions, and then refused to go into detail. Well. here is the detail. The Background First things first. If you haven’t read Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Contracts […]